The Armory Show Announces 15-Site Responsive Projects

The Armory Show has announced the participating artists in the 2018 Platform section. Curated by Jen Mergel, Vice President of Programming for the Association of Art Museum Curators, The Contingent will feature 15 site-responsive projects, including 11 new works by The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Sarah Cain, Beth Campbell, Tara Donovan, Leonardo Drew, Jeffrey Gibson, JR, Amalia Pica, Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley, Berndnaut Smilde, and Wilmer Wilson IV.

“In destabilizing times, it feels essential to highlight art that thrives on contingency: on the assembly of different elements and ever-changing outcomes,” Mergel explains. “For decades, a discourse has been building around art practices that hinge not on established conventions of genre or medium, but on shifting factors of location, time, materiality, and social climate. We have called these ‘site-specific’ or ‘process driven’ or ‘participatory’ or ‘institutional critique’ or, more broadly, ‘context-dependent.’ Today, there is new appreciation for how a work’s unfixed format, unfolding development, shared authorship and multivalent meaning could actually be ‘responsive’—a form of authenticity, even resistance. The Contingent affirms the collective over the singular, the fluid over the fixed, the active over the passive.”

“The Contingent embodies New York’s identity, the piers’ massive architecture, and the fair’s dynamic social activity,” says Nicole Berry, Executive Director of The Armory Show, “Jen has organized an incredibly strong and thoughtful collection of artists whose work feels both urgent and timeless in the context of the fair and in the larger world climate. From performance to site-specific installations, the 2018 Platform section reflects the true identity of The Armory Show as a place for unparalleled creative energy, collective activity and diversity of vision.”